The present disclosure relates to the subject matter contained in Japanese Patent Application No. 2001-303026 filed on Sep. 28, 2001, which is incorporated here by reference in its entirely.
The present invention relates to a technical field of a reproduction device for reproducing audio information from a recording medium containing audio information corresponding to a musical piece. More particularly, the invention relates to an audio information reproduction device which enables a called disk jockey to successively reproduce musical pieces from a plurality of recording media.
Recently, in a place or facility, called a club, a music editor, called a disk jockey, selects and reproduces dance musical pieces, people enjoy dancing to those edited musical pieces. Usually, many musical pieces reproduced for dance music have each a length of several minutes. The disk jockey skillfully connects a plurality of musical pieces in an uninterrupted fashion, and reproduces them. Accordingly, people can enjoy dancing while being little aware of the connections of musical pieces.
To uninterruptedly reproduce a plurality of musical pieces, when the reproducing operation of one musical piece ends, the reproduced sound volume is gradually decreased, while at the same time the reproducing operation of the next musical piece is started and the sound volume is gradually increased. In this way, two pieces of music are connected uninterruptedly. In a case where the audio recording medium of the disk type is utilized, at least two disk players are prepared, and a musical piece is first reproduced from one sheet of music disk. When the reproducing operation of the musical piece draws to an end, the disk jockey operates the other disk player and starts the reproducing operation of another musical piece from another music disk. If the two musical pieces to be connected are not harmonious in rhythm, the listener feels clumsy at the connection of the two musical pieces.
In connection with this, there is known an audio information reproduction device which detects BPMs (beat per minute; corresponds to a speed of a music) from the audio data of the two musical pieces, and controls a reproducing rate of the disk player so that those BPMs are equal to each other. A method of detecting the BPMs from the audio data of the musical pieces is disclosed in the Unexamined Japanese Patent Application Publication No. Hei 8-201542, for example.
Even in a case where the BPMs are detected and the rates of reproducing the two musical pieces to be connected are made to be equal to each other, if the beat of one musical piece is shifted in position from that of the other musical piece, the listener feels something unnatural again.